When I first learned of Christopher Columbus in the 1960s, the society in which I lived seemed to adore him. The ocean blue and 1492 rang in my mind like a church bell extolling the greatness of America. His exploits modeled the best that each of us might strive to emulate; rugged individualism, curiosity, raw courage, perseverance. The dude had his own day.
However, when it first became my responsibility to share the story of Christopher Columbus with young people in my care in 1988, things had changed. While some continued to hold tight to Columbus as hero, many began looking more closely at Columbus the man; his documented behaviors and what his arrival in the Americas meant for tens of millions of Native Americans.
How does a society move away from adoration toward condemnation so quickly?
Part of the answer to that question is explored in The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus (2025) by Matthew Restall. With chapters literally headed “Life One”, “Life Two”, “Life Three”, and so on, it is telling that Columbus doesn’t reach the American psyche until “Life Eight”.
But it is through the American experience that most of us have learned about Columbus, so I will begin in familiar territory in order to exemplify the larger theme of Restall’s fascinating book. “Life Eight: The Adam” situates Columbus within the founding moments of the United States even though it had been nearly three centuries since his historic voyage. A number of books were published in the 1770s that positioned Columbus as one who “promoted true liberty, serving as a force against the pernicious powers of Europe, especially England and the empire of ‘the avaricious Spaniards.’”
Evidence of Columbus’ popularity in the United States is found in the many things that bear a form of his name, notably the nation’s new capital, Washington, District of Columbia. As Restall writes, “Washington was the nation’s father, Columbus its grandfather.” Perhaps the most significant contribution to the elevation of Columbus hero worship was the publication of Washington Irving’s A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828. “Irving’s book,” Restall writes, “was so successful and influential that its details became permanently lodged in the American perception of Columbus, reiterated in paintings and sculpture, poems and plays, and hundreds of books of all kinds—from the art in the U.S. Capitol to children’s books to the immensely popular 1892 (and 1992) postage stamps.”
While ostensibly a piece of historical fiction, Irving’s work is more accurately described as myth-making in the spirit of American nationalism. It was here that Columbus was propped up as a “brilliant visionary, ahead of his time, the wise man of action who knew better than all the men of learning…”
Irving’s Columbus challenged the beliefs of the day; especially the notion that he defied those who believed that the earth was flat and that he alone would risk his life to prove what he knew to be true. This part of Irving’s story is a complete fabrication as knowledge of the shape of the world was widely understood by the 1490s. Irving also planted images in American minds of Columbus being welcomed by Native Americans and celebrated upon his return to Spain. All of these devices were used to embellish Columbus as a heroic man of virtue rejecting corrupt European societies and bringing civilization to the Americas.
Many scholars knew that Irving was making much of this up and they challenged his portrayal of Columbus. But even as these more accurate histories were put forth, Matthew Restall notes that the American “public preferred Columbus not as a complex, flawed, egomaniac, but as a simple American hero—‘underdog, individualist, pathfinder, and Pilgrim-like agent of Christianity.’”
The truth of Columbus was not as important as the purpose served by Irving’s Columbus; as an origin story for a blossoming country. It is no coincidence that a generation or so removed from the founding, Columbus joined the pantheon of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton and more. Restall writes that “[r]espect for the American Columbus became a firm part of how American schoolchildren were socialized as good patriots.” As I was taught in the 1960s.
While Washington Irving played loose with the truth, he was following in a long tradition of “fetishizing” Christopher Columbus to serve contemporary purposes.
Beginning only a few years after his death in 1506, Columbus was propped up as the poster boy of empire. While the record is clear on many basic points of Columbus’s life, many mysteries remain, particularly regarding his personal exploits and ambitions, Matthew Restall clearly identifies and supports with extensive notes what is known and what is not known. Alongside these legitimate sources of information are five centuries of myth-making, fabrications, bias, and uncertainty. Primary sources, the gold-standard of historical research, still require scrutiny. In this case, primary sources such as the Columbus diary of the first voyage and his official reports delivered to the King and Queen of Spain were certainly influenced by the explorer’s desire to be seen in a favorable light and in the hopes of securing support for additional voyages. (There were four, in all.)
Columbus was obsessed with his legacy and was clearly in pursuit of titles, privileges, and the subsequent income which would establish his family in Spain for generations to come. So, any documents created from his pen should be interpreted with these personal wishes in mind.
Further, any titles bestowed upon Columbus were hereditary so his two sons, Diego and Ferdinand, clearly had a stake in Columbus being seen as the intrepid discoverer of the New World. For centuries, historians have relied upon The Life of Admiral Christopher Columbus as a signature examination of the life and times of Christopher Columbus. Never mind that it was written by his son Ferdinand.
While historians have argued over the veracity of this source of information, Restall offers a great deal of evidence that Ferdinand was clearly motivated to establish his father as being worthy of his titles and privileges, those the son hoped to secure for himself. As the four voyages of Columbus to the New World were an economic failure, Ferdinand was motivated to assign a different purpose to the story; bringing Christian “civilization” to the “heathens.” While this was certainly a part of Spanish colonization, Restall offers solid evidence that converting Native Americans was secondary to growing the empire. He also offers compelling indications that bringing religion to the natives was simply a justification for their harsh treatment under Spanish boots. For good measure, Ferdinand includes a story of rebirth wholly unsupported in the historical record.
Knowing that his father at some point arrived in Lisbon in the 1470s, Ferdinand decides to explain how he got there. As Restall writes of Ferdinand’s book, Columbus was “engaging in hand-to-hand combat all day long, until the Venetian galley on which he was fighting caught fire, forcing him to leap overboard. Clutching a fate-given oar, the young Christophorous swam two leagues (equivalent to seven land miles) to shore where he collapsed half-dead—still breathing only because ‘God was saving him for great things.’”
Restall adds that “the [resurrection] story can still be found in almost every book on Columbus, having lived a long life of repetition and embellishment, mutated from fiction into fact by the alchemy of Columbiana” (Columbiana is the vast collection of Columbus-related books, monuments, and statues that have established the many myths surrounding Christopher Columbus). After all, “[w]riters and readers preferred their Columbus to be adventurous and swashbuckling, tested by fire and chosen by God.”
Restall cites a recent scholar of Ferdinand who wrote “resurrection is amongst the most powerful narrative devices ever invented.’” He adds that “[t]he resurrection… story also served as necessary filler for [future] biographers unable to find real evidence of exactly how Columbus landed in Portugal.”
This is a single story among many in which the son “filled in those gaps [in his father’s life] with imaginative claims and fictional details—inventions that seeped into all early published accounts of Columbus’s life, and from there into Columbiana’s great book pile.”
There are other sixteenth century sources of information on Christopher Columbus but Matthew Restall offers evidence which suggest that many of these tellings were influenced by Ferdinand’s mythical account of his father’s life. As Restall reflects, “it is the Columbus they created who has been absorbed by subsequent storytellers—by writers who favored, as tellers and consumers of stories tend to do, a simple narrative through-line to which heroes can cling and villains fall by the wayside. Readers want romance and resurrection; reality need not get in the way.”
As I mentioned, Columbiana did not begin in the United States. The many mysteries that surround Columbus’s life have become fertile ground for all sorts of fabrications serving contemporary agendas; for more than five centuries.
In “Life One: The Genoese,” Restall describes life in fifteenth century Genoa, Columbus’ birthplace. As the son of a cloth weaver and wool trader, Columbus would have led a rather mundane life until he, like many in this port city, went to sea. This reality did not stop Ferdinand from embellishing his father’s early years with “an increasingly grandiose conception of his own purpose in life—given and guided by God, no less.”
In “Life Two: The Admiral,” Restall speaks to the inevitability of New World discovery. Columbiana concludes that Christopher Columbus almost single-handedly changed the world. Restall: “The fact that he was the first to cross from Europe to the Americas and back—putting aside the Norsemen in Newfoundland five centuries earlier, as well as other claims—has obscured the fact that he was part of a process involving many men, thereby elevating his primacy status and generating a myth of uniqueness. But he is better understood… as a more or less typical southern European merchant seaman seeking to use ocean-bound mobility to achieve socioeconomic mobility. In doing so, he became an explorer, slave trader, and conquistador among tens of thousands of his era.”
He adds that, whether it was Columbus or someone else who could claim the mantle of “first,” the colonization of the Americas would almost certainly “have occurred in almost the same way (and perhaps, as far as we know, the very same way…).” He adds that “the political, religious, and linguistic map of the Americas today would still be the same.”
In “Life Three: The Remains,” Restall tells of the centuries-long effort to lay claim to Columbus’s remains. In many cases, the claim is motivated by attracting tourist dollars. Adding to Columbus mythical lore is that his bones, wherever they are, “function like holy relics, mementos of death whose ironic purpose is to serve as markers of immortality.”
In “Life Four: The Saint,” Restall recounts the effort to reinforce Columbus as delivered by God because, for “believers… evidence-based understandings of his historical life are secondary or even irrelevant” to their faith. After the voyages failed economically, which doesn’t help much when crafting an origin story, a new narrative was needed. As his early biographers have conveniently claimed, the voyages were “reimagin[ed] as sacred journeys, secret missions, to spread the true faith.”
In “Life Five: The Lover,” we learn how the shortcomings in Columbus’s life are whitewashed by son-biographer Ferdinand, particularly the fact that Ferdinand’s mother was not Columbus’s wife but his mistress.
In “Life Six: The Local,” Restall again speaks to the monetary value of Columbiana tourism. While it is clear to historians that Columbus was born in the port city of Genoa in what is now northern Italy, this has not prevented many others to claim Columbus as their own.
In “Life Seven: The Iberian,” Spanish and Portuguese efforts to lay claim to Columbus’s legacy resulted in widespread statue building and adulation, especially in preparation for 1892, the quadricentennial of the First Landing.
Finally, In “Life Nine: The Italian,” Columbus rose once again. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italians facing anti-immigrant discrimination, found it convenient to expropriate Columbus as one of their own after discovering that Anglo-America had among their founding fathers an Italian.
By the quincentennial of the First Landing in 1992, Columbiana began to fade. As the Civil Rights Movement focused on equality and inclusiveness, Americans began to ponder more seriously the actual story of Christopher Columbus and focus more attention on those Americans he first encountered. Interestingly, as much as Matthew Restall recognizes that much of what we think we know of Columbus is pure fiction, he does not hold him accountable, as many now do, for being the instigator of genocide. Indeed, he argues that, just as Columbus was not a critical piece to the manner in which the story played out, neither does he castigate a single individual for the calamity that befell tens of millions of Native Americans. It is sad to say, but his understanding of the nature of empire at the time, leads to another sort of inevitability regarding the fate of empire’s victims.
“In 1992, empires were no longer being celebrated; on the contrary, there was more interest in uncovering the stories of those people who had suffered empire, and Columbus could all too easily be turned into a symbol of that suffering,” Restall writes.
And in the end, this is what “Christopher Columbus” actually is; a product of empire, perhaps even a necessary feature, a God-inspired hero to justify all the destruction in the name of wealth and power.
I’m glad that we no longer celebrate Columbus Day as we once did. Matthew Restall cites Russell Means of the American Indian Movement in the 1970s who said it best while demonstrating the enduring power of symbolism. “‘Columbus makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.’ Asking Indigenous Americans to take a balanced view of Columbus Day, said Means, was like asking Jews to adopt a ‘balanced view of the Holocaust’ on a day named after Hitler.”
Restall concludes this masterful work by proclaiming that in a society where “multiculturalism is both growing and contested, Columbus’s utility has expired—except to serve as culture war battleground.” Driving home the point with a hammer, and reminding all of us that mythically driven symbols die hard, President Donald Trump recently signed a proclamation hoping to restore Columbus Day to its original glory while rejecting the support for Indigenous People’s Day. In the proclamation, he referred to Christopher Columbus as an “original American hero.”*
*https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/10/columbus-day-2025/
